Mir's end highlights pitiful state of Russian space program

Associated Press

Published Sunday, March 18, 2001

KOROLYOV, Russia -- From a technological pioneer to a crumbling old-timer, the Mir space station is tumbling into oblivion after a 15-year career that mirrored the steady demise of Russia's once-proud space program and its now bleak future.

The rest of the world is worrying about Mission Control's ability to safely direct tons of Mir's debris into an isolated patch of the Pacific early Thursday.

Russian cosmonauts, space officials, politicians and media are lamenting the passing of one of the few remaining symbols of Russia's past might.

''By dumping Mir we are drawing a line under the epoch when our country was justly considered a superpower,'' the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets, Russia's largest-circulation daily, said in an editorial. ''Mir will break up just as our one-time great country did.''

Communist lawmakers put the end of the orbiter high on the list of what it considers the Russian government's blunders. ''The government's decision to dump Mir deals a fatal blow to the Russian manned space program,'' Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov said in parliament.

Cosmonauts, many now facing the loss of their jobs, bombarded the government and parliament with letters urging that Mir be kept in orbit. They argued that participation in the 16-nation International Space Station only depletes Russia's resources and gives it nothing in return.

''Within the next four or five years, we will lose our edge in manned space programs, and that will deal a huge economic and political damage to the country,'' a group of cosmonauts said in a letter last month.

Anatoly Artsebarsky, a Mir cosmonaut who signed the letter, said Russia's role in the ISS largely boils down to providing cargo ships and escape capsules. ''We will simply serve as a backup worker for the Americans,'' he said in an interview.

Yuri Koptev, chief of the Russian Aerospace Agency and the leading advocate of Russia's participation in the ISS, sees the project as Russia's only chance to stay on the cutting edge of space research.

Koptev insisted Mir be dumped because it had grown increasingly decrepit and unsafe and was diverting money from other vital tasks, such as modernizing Russia's increasingly obsolete satellite fleet.

About 80 percent of Russia's 110 satellites have already served their designated lifetime, and the cash-strapped space agency lacks money to quickly build replacements.

Building new navigation satellites for the military is the top priority. ''We only have 13 out of 24 satellites in the system left, and we face a real danger of losing this system,'' Koptev said last month.

Russia has also been unable to fill all orbit spots assigned to its communications satellites under international agreements, and other countries may claim those places if they remain empty, Koptev warned. Many Russian companies already rely on foreign communications satellites because no space is available on Russian ones.

Koptev's opponents say participation in the ISS will gobble up far more resources than Mir did, leaving nothing for upgrading satellites.

''We shouldn't have joined the ISS project,'' cosmonaut Viktor Afanasyev said with a sigh. ''Like a bad chess player, we just thought one move ahead.''

Koptev insists Russia made the best deal it could, getting one third of the project's resources, while investing only 4 percent to 6 percent of its costs.

Illustrating the funding problems, Koptev said the government this year has budgeted only $94 million toward its obligation of $171 million for the ISS.

''We are catastrophically short of funds,'' Koptev said.

He said the money crunch is jeopardizing Russia's commitments to provide the cargo ships and crew capsules for the ISS, to say nothing about Russia's own research program.

The Americans have been vexed by the Russian delays in building a pivotal segment for crew housing, which put the entire project two years behind schedule.

Russians, in turn, have been disappointed by NASA's refusal to ferry some of Mir's nearly 13.2 tons of scientific equipment to the ISS.

With the ISS finally manned since November, there also is friction between Russians and Americans over Moscow's plan to send 60-year-old California millionaire Dennis Tito to the station as a tourist.

The Russian space agency signed a multimillion-dollar deal with Tito to give him a ride on the Mir just before the government decided to dump the station. It then promised to send him on a weeklong excursion to the ISS at the end of April.

NASA opposes the plan, saying space tourists would only distract crew from work.

But a spokesman for the space agency, Sergei Gorbunov, said in an interview that Russia would send Tito to the ISS on April 30 despite what he described as NASA's ''growling.'' ''NASA has no legal grounds whatsoever to prevent us from doing that,'' he said.

Unlike many of his colleagues, cosmonaut Vladimir Solovyov, a member of Mir's first crew who is now directing the station's end as Mission Control chief, declines to discuss his personal feelings for the station.

''My only wish is that the deorbit comes out successfully,'' he said. ''We have a lot of other work to do in the future. Mir was just a page in the life.''